, she said, was her own affair, and she intended to learn useful things and not useless ones. Considering that the useless ones in question
included nearly every branch of ordinary information, and quite every ladylike accomplishment, it will be seen that Babs had at least the courage of her
opinions.61
Given that the novel’s main character is a boy, women’s education is obviously
not a central concern, and thereisnoalternative understanding of its main
purpose than to produce a ‘lady’. In the case of Babs Kennedy, this process
would give her the polish of what

founded on courage, heroism or valour. Any Norwegian publisher would have done the same in the Rushdie affair. Thereisnoalternative. Any alternative would undermine our whole tradition as guarantors of freedom of expression, a principle which Norwegian publishers have stood by for decades. 42
The response from the literary and creative community was generally favourable to Rushdie – concerned as it was to defend the freedoms of writers and artists. Frances d’Souza and Carmel Bedford founded the International Committee for the Defence of

to morality and threaten the mind’s control of the body. In this account, eating is to gluttony as recreational drug use is to addiction, except that thereisnoalternative to eating and any attempt to eat less than a ‘rational’ quantity is also sinful. The requirements to eat enough and not to eat too much are similarly inexorable and at the same time as problematising appetite, she presents ‘prudent’ and ‘reasonable’ consumption as self-evident. The limits of Mary’s ‘share’ of pie are obvious to Mary as the line between debility and excess is obvious to the

off despair. District and Circle sees
Heaney beginning to suspect that thereisnoalternative but to interiorise and to cherish the past as the tangible world becomes ever more
insecure and loveless in outlook, no longer offering the comfort and
succour that it once promised. This shift in perspective triggers a new
urgency in Heaney’s interest in ‘Real Names’, and his new drive
towards estrangement is concerned with the paring apart of memories,
separating the real from the made-up in an attempt to restore the lines
of differentiation between the qualities that